Circa AD 1900 to 1929

I sat down. “Give me the potion,” I said. “If the worst comes to the worst it will save having my hair cut, and that I think is one of the most hateful duties of a civilized man. How do you take the mixture?”

Sadly, we haven’t tracked down the script (possibly because it was never published), but we know from several reviews that the modern day Sir Guy loathes the very mention of days of old.

Through into a little room whose narrow window showed the blue day-lit sky—a room with not much in it but a bed, a carved stool, and a boy of his own age, dressed in the kind of dress you see in the pictures of the little sons of Charles the First.

Following the directions of the two men we walked on: but the path pointed out to us seemed to lead away from where we imagined the Petit Trianon to be; and there was a feeling of depression and loneliness about the place. I began to feel as if I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive. At last we came upon a path crossing ours, and saw in front of us a building consisting of some columns roofed in, and set back in the trees. Seated on the steps was a man with a heavy black cloak round his shoulders, and wearing a slouch hat. At that moment the eerie feeling which had begun in the garden culminated in a definite impression of something uncanny and fear-inspiring. The man slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox: his complexion was very dark.

Yes. They had only been married a couple of months.

Far, far away, at the foot of a cliff, a Thunder Lizard—which must have been at least one hundred feet long—appeared out of the mists of forty million years.

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

All this nobility stuff is bunk.

He that taketh this crystal, so, in his hand, at night, and wishes, saying ‘At a certain hour let it be’; the hour comes and he will go back eight, ten, even twelve years if he will, into the past, and do a thing again, or act otherwise than he did. The day passes; the ten years are accomplished once again; he is here once more; but he is what he might have become had he done that one thing otherwise.

Divers incestes sont consommés. Palentête a quelques raisons de croire qu’il est son propre père.

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Various incests are consummated. Skullhead has some reason to believe that he is his own father.

He must have loved this Felice, and we may have brought him back to what is, for him, an empty world.

But the main point I desire to make is that this neutralization was to be effected by a combination of the ordinary wave impluse with the Callieri Cool Wave. The combination, you understand. It had never been tried on a large scale—it was a virgin experiment.

So the professor was given a free hand, and went below. It was past nine o’clock.

I remained on the bridge enjoying a cigar with the officer of the deck, and chatting over a coming boar hunt we were to have south of the canal during the coming weekend. we had been talking for perhaps ten minutes in the darkness of the bridge, with the black satin of the Caribbean spreading out ahead and about the ship, and the diamond stars projecting just above our heads as though ready for any plucking hand, when suddenly we found ourselves half blinded by a dazzling light in the west.

“Perhaps I ought to explain,” he continued. “You see, I’m a clockwork man.”

After wading through years of fruitless research and encountering failures enough to make the heart sick, I accidentally got into communication with an intelligence whose home was no single sphere but the universe, one to whom human time was nought, as were also human fears, joys, sorrows and emotions. The fortunes of mankind meant no more to him that thosee of a tribe of insects, one year swarming over the earth, the next swept out of existence.

He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”

If he did meet Savile, he was prepared to shake hands with him in the old way, and to realize what a neurotic fool he had been: also that Destiny had made an idiot of itself with the careless blundering born of the knowledge that nobody would ever know, nobody, that is, except himself; and, of course, Destiny safely relied on the assumption that nobody would believe him.

I know I love you, Ken! But today—during the marriage service—something seemed to reach out of the Past that made me—afraid!

Sir Arthur Strangways: Only a trifle. I wish to see a file of the Times.
Hahalaba:For what year?

You see, it’s all right, uncle, when I’m sure! Then we go strong for all we’re worth. Don’t we, Bassett?

How’s this? We throw a modern section into the picture. The hero’s a young hoofer in a Broadway show, right? Now he sings and he dances, right? But one night backstage, he’s reading A Tale of Two Cities, in between numbers, see? And a sandbag falls and hits him on the head, and he dreams he’s back during the French Revolution, right? Well, this way we get in the modern dancing numbers—♫Charleston, Charleston♫—but in the dream part, we can still use the costume stuff!

We crossed over the centre of Lake Victoria and so northward, parallel to the well “trained” banks of the Nile. The Sudd region had been drained and embanked, thus saving the evaporation of millions of tons of water annually.

If I could go back into the past, there is one event which I should most certainly change: my rescue of Paul Arkwright!

To come to my point, Richard, I have for many years been very disgusted with the fact that all the human race—indeed every living organism—must waste a third of its life in sleep. Think what a race we’d be if we never slept!

In my time it was June 5, 1942. The only thing that’s certain is that it is summer; the year depends on—well, it depends on what year you were living in when all this happened.

The alternative was staggaring more than my facilities could hold or deal with—that my cousin, sleeping calmly in that bed, had left our spance and time for a period of four years, and that before this complete disappearance, as a preliminary to it, by way of training possibly, he had escaped our time, while still occupying our space, for a far longer period, for some twenty-five years. 

In eternity, the Law of Chance functions perfectly. In eternity, sooner or later, every possible combinaton of things and events must happen. Must happen, if it’s a possible combination. I say, therefore, that in eterminty, whatever can happen will happen!

Never before had it occurred to me to ask myself why the sun should rise each morning on a new day instead of upon the old day over again; or to wonder how much of what I did was really my own to do. It may be that here on this earth we are not grateful enough for our ignorance, and our innocence. We think that there is only one road, one direction—forward; and we accept it, and press on. We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us.

She was dressed in a long linen duster and a linen hat, bound round with an emerald veil tied in a bow under her chin. Modish clothing for motoring—in 1905.

There’s something different about that child. I wondered if my pencil could catch it.

“This is most extraordinary,” he said in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice, regarding Houghton benignly from the tall white fortress of his collar. “You say that you have come back through time to instruct me how to arrange my affairs so that they will not be instrumental in destroying the world some fifty years hence.”

It looks like there was something about that swim in the river that threw me back ten years!

There is no money . . . just the house. As the last of the Jaremys, it’s your duty.

Keep your voice down, Harrison! You might wake Martin, and that would be dangerous! It would alter the past!

Professor Mark Hanson has tus far been unable to get a single person to use his remarkable discovery for recovering the past!

They can not hang me now, Annette! I have all the time in the world to escape from this island!

Will you come right over? My water heater looks dangerous!

When I speak of time, I’m speaking of the fourth dimension.

Laura! The freshest, most radiant creature God ever created. Eighteen when I married her, Marty, . . . twenty-five when she died.

In what time period will you find yourselves when you land at your particular destinatoin!

Open up! I’ve had enough of this! Whatever crazy explanation there is, I want it now!

Somehow I’ve become another Jessamy in a different time! It must be a different time because of the clothes. Nobody wears long skirts like Matchett and Aunt now—I mean that—oh, I don’t know what I mean!

“But I’m not Clare,” Charlotte began to say hopelessly, then stopped herself, explanation being impossible, especially since this girl seemed to think so incredibly that she was Clare.

Now is the time. Look straight ahead and don’t be afraid.

I remember what someone once said; I think it was Einstein or somebody like that. He compared time to a winding river, with all of us in a boat drifting along between two high banks. And we can’t see the future beyond the next curve or the past beyond the curves in back of us, but it’s all still there, as real as the moment around us. To which I now add my own theory . . . that you can’t drive into the past in a modern car because there were no modern cars back then, and you can’t drive into 1926 along a four-lane superhighway, but my car and I—the way I felt about it anyway—were literally rejected that night by our own time.

He thought she wouldn’t answer but finally she said, “What if I can’t go back? What if I have to live out Brandy’s life? She lives an awfully long time, Corbin.”

Come back to me.

Is it all ready? Right. Come on then. Back to creation. We mustn’t waste any more time. They’ll think I’ve lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

1. Travel is possible only into the past.
2. The object transported will return to exactly the time and place of departure.
3. It is not possible to bring objects from the past to the present.
4. Actions in the past cannot change the present.

If you build it, they will come.

I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that yiou must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.

They’re back there in the past, trampling around, changing things, aren’t they? They don’t know it. They’re just living their happy lives, but changing small events. Mostly trivial, with no important effects. But every once in a while the effect of some small changed event moves on down to the—

If you can’t change anything because it’s already happened, you may as well smell the flowers.

“Well, at least that’s good,” said Jack. “The ship won’t sink, even if it is lost.”

Jack slowly stood up. His legs felt wobbly. As he brushed off his pants, the deep rumbling came again—louder than before.

“People can’t go back. You can’t change history Think about it! When my father was five years old, he lost his brother. It changed his life. He became an only child, grew up as an only child. All his memories are of being an only one. You can’t change that now, can you?”

“No,” Charlie said quickly. “I’m sorry.”

His uncle hadn’t finished. “Henry’s parents mourned him, just as they mourned poor little Daphne. James was their only child and, as a result, he was probably spoiled. His father died in the war and his mother left everything to him, including her lovely cottage by the sea. You can’t change that, can you?”

Molly, that’s totally crazy. You can’t stop yourself from existing because you do exist, you have to exist.

Es regnete fürchterlich. Ich hätte besser nicht nur den Regenmantel, sondern auch Gummistiefel angezogen. Mein Lieblings-Magnolienbaum an der Ecke ließ traurif sein Blüten hängen. Brevor ich ihn erreicht hatte, war ich schon dreimal in eine Pfütze getreten. Als ich gerade eine vierte umgehen wollte, riss es mich vollkommen ohne Vorwarnung von den Beinen. Mein magen fuhr Achterbahn und die Straße verschwamm vor meinen Augen zu einem grauen Fluss.

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It was raining cats and dogs, and I wished I’d put on my wellies. The flowers on my favorite magnolia tree on the corner were drooping in a melancholy way. Before I reached it, I’d already splashed through three puddles. Just as I was trying to steer my way around a fourth, I was swept suddenly off my soggy feet. My stomach flip-flopped, and before my eyes, the street blurred into a grey river.

Annie: Are you ready to leave?
Stephen: Yes.
Annie: How long will it take?
Stephen: I don’t know: seconds, decades, an eternity.
Annie: An eternity? For a few moments together?
Stephen: Yes.

So much hot air rising above the tables in the Café Heck or the Osteria Bavaria, like smoke from the ovens. It was difficult to believe from this perspective that Hitler was going to lay waste to the world in a few years’ time.

“Time isn’t circular,” she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a palimpsest.”
“Oh, dear,” he said. “That sounds very vexing.”
“And memories are sometimes in the future.”

Think of History as a living organism, with its own defence mechanisms. History will not permit anything to change events that have already taken place. If History thinks, even for one moment, that that is about to occur, then it will, without hesitation, eliminate the threatening virus. Or historian, as we like to call them.

We came by the raft dishonestly. We’d only meant to do a little fishing. It was cool and nice under the big willow with its whips trailing over the water. Christ, it was a scorcher of a day. The whole town must have fallen asleep, along with Jim and me. When we finally did wake, if we ever did, the raft was too far along in space and time to return it. We could no longer reverse ourselves, our motions in all five dimensions, than fly to the moon.

The house Parry lived in had been built in 1928, right before the Depression hit, and the odd thing was that it apparently was haunted from the very beginning. From day one.

Tell me something I can hold onto forever and never let go.

Yup, this woman was talking on a mobile phone—in 1928—decades before they were invented.

But as time goes by, at birthdays or other annual markers, people begin to notice you aren’t getting any older.

“There’s nothing to return to.” Eliot’s knuckles bulged at the seams, but she didn’t yell. “When the Fade destroys a moment, it’s lost. Forever.”

“So, you time travelled,” said Janice.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure you didn’t just dream this?”
“Yes.”
Janice considered it. “Well, it is odd. But there are a lot of things in life I can’t explain.”
“You believe me?”
“I think I do, though you might not want to tell everyone what happened. It could raise questions.”
“About time travel or my mental stability?”

Annie turned back to the couple. “Excuse me again, do you know today’s date?” she asked.
“September eighth,” the woman said with a friendly smile.
“Nineteen-hundred?” Jack asked.

So . . . some people inherit diabetess, some inherit curly hair, and I inherited time travel?

You were right—the photograph, it was me, it . . . It will be. I don’t know how, but it will.

Plus, if you shut down the time machine and never came into the future, you would never do all the great things you have already done in your life. We wouldn’t be standing her right now if you went back in time and convinced your parents to dismantle the project.

You come to the conclusion that you can correct everything if you stop yourself before you steal the time machine.

Reece, it isn’t just clarvoyance or neurosis, either.
She’d tell him in person, the thing they should have come out and admitted from the start.
It’s time travel.

If you’re a friend of bears, then take my advice: Walk softly and carry a big stick.

All we need is to get Raphael to draw me and make sure he signs it.

Attends . . . si maman n'épouse pas papa, je vais pas naître. Je viens de me tuer.

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Wait . . . if Mom never marries Dad, I won’t be born. I just killed myself.

Mustafa Kemal 16 Mayıs günü o gemiye sağ salim binemezse Kurtsuluşı Savaşı başlamayacak. Cumhuriyet kurulmayacak. Türkiye diye bir ülke olmayacak.

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If Mustafa Kamal doesn’t board that ship on May the 16^th, the War of Independence won’t begin, the Republic won’t be founded, and Turkey will never come to be!

Well, someone killed our mothers, so we shouldn’t exist, but clearly we do exist, and the universe can’t handle it, which is a problem.